Tuesday, September 27, 2016

Old School Is Too Cool: The Dungeon Fantasy RPG

It not often I get asked to help out with another company's promotion. But SJ Games reached out to me and asked to post this article by Christopher Rice about the Dungeon Fantasy RPG. The only benefit I am receiving from this is a link to my blog from SJ Games; social media. After Mr. Rice's article I will link to some things that may be of interest to fans of GURPS that I have written about.

Old School Is Too Cool: The Dungeon Fantasy RPG

The first ever GURPS Kickstarter ends September 30, and has funded. While that’s incredible news for fans, it’s absolutely amazing news for those not yet acquainted with the Generic Universal RolePlaying System or GURPS.

The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is based on the excellent GURPS Dungeon Fantasy series.Dungeon Fantasy is old-school roleplaying (go on a quest, kill some monsters, get some treasure) that uses the flexible and potent GURPS engine. I like to tell my new players that GURPS is like a smartphone: There’s an app for everything! Except in this case, there’s a rule for everything. The beauty of the system is that you don’t have to use those rules. You can pare it down to the bare bones if you want – and that’s exactly what Sean Punch does in this new game. The Dungeon Fantasy RPG starts with the GURPS rules set, takes only what it needs, and ignores everything else. This boxed set is broken down into a multiple books: Adventurers, Exploits, Spells, Monsters, and Dungeon.

Adventurers streamlines the front-loaded character-creation process for GURPS, making it quick and manageable. All the details you need are right there and ready to go.

Exploits gives players and GMs clear and concise rules for Doing Stuff. The task scaling modifiers using narrative descriptors alone is amazing, but everything in this book is downright useful to old hands as well as new. Exploits takes the rules from the GURPS Basic Set: Campaigns, boils them down to their essence, and then adds more, while somehow speeding up game play.

Spells uses the GURPS Magic system, with several tweaks to turn spells into more playable (and streamlined) traits.

Monsters has every sort of creature you can shake a stick at and then some. From your humble orc all the way to the exotic six-armed peshkali, and of course everyone’s favorite: the leaping leech.
The provided adventure, I Smell a Rat, harkens back to the old All in a Night’s Work (though it’s a group adventure, not a solo one).

Sean Punch provides an action-packed boxed set with things newcomers to GURPS can enjoy – and enough novel rules and approaches to game mechanics that old hands will enjoy it just as much.

The design obviously incorporates solutions to problems gamers had with the standard Dungeon Fantasy series, while remaining true to spirit of GURPS and Dungeon Fantasy. If I can use a metaphor: The Dungeon Fantasy RPG is the recipe handed down to your children after years of perfecting the original so it’s “just right.”

This is in my opinion the best work Sean Punch has written to date. What he does with established material turns Dungeon Fantasy on its head – in a good way. So if you haven’t seen the Kickstarter yet, head on over, buy a copy of the new boxed set (or two or three!) and be welcomed into the world of Dungeon Fantasy and the larger world of GURPS.

The biggest concern people often have about this is what I call the Munchkin factor. Munchkin is a game that in part as a parody of various genres including dungeon crawling. I have the Dungeon Fantasy line and for the most part it is a straight forward well designed distillation of GURPS for the type of campaigns that most people use the various DnD core books. It is not GURPS Dungeon Munchkins or GURPS Hackmaster 4e. And the Dungeon Fantasy RPG look to be similar in tone. And as you saw from the preview of the Bard I posted, it will support all types of roleplaying encounter as least as well as any edition of DnD does.

So why GURPS and not just stick with DnD. Well even at the 250 pt level that the DF line targets GURPS is a deadly game. Character survive because of their skill not because they can sit there and absorb blow after blow. If you caught under the wrong circumstance or somebody has better tactics, you are going to go down quickly. Combined with character customization it makes for a different kind of challenge than your average DnD campaign.

Last I want to say that my Majestic Wilderlands is a translation of the templates and stuff I used in my GURPS into DnD classes and items. When the DF RPG is in hand I plan on taking my original notes updating them and releasing them as a free document/ For example the Myrmidon template above. The Knight Killer Crossbow, etc.

Bat in the Attic Games

How to make a Sandbox

The Old School Renaissance

To me the Old School Renaissance is not about playing a particular set of rules in a particular way, the dungeon crawl. It is about going back to the roots of our hobby and seeing what we could do differently. What avenues were not explored because of the commercial and personal interests of the game designers of the time.

What are RPGs?

A game where the players play individual characters interacting with a setting with their actions adjudicated by a human referee.

Rules are an aide to help the referee adjudicate actions and to help the players interact with the setting.

Dice are used to inject uncertainty which make a tabletop RPG campaign more interesting than "Let's Pretend".

The only thing a player needs to do to roleplay a character is to act if he or she was really there in the setting in that situation.